Struggling with Text-to-Speech and Natural Voices

Hello,

I bought and set up this PC mainly to run the X-Plane 12 flight simulator. There is very little extra software installed (Outlook, Sumatra PDF, Firefox, Navigraph Charts, Elgato Stream Deck).

I have a separate utility that offers Air Traffic Control simulation (Pilot2ATC). That application uses Text-to-Speech (TTS) to convert the text it generates into speech. Part of the setup was to add Natural Voices (via System, Narrator) and a couple of additional SAPI voices so as to add variety to the speech. For the Natural Voices, the developer offered a tool (NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter Installer) which I believe bridges Natural Voices and SAPI voices in some way.

It was all working at the beginning of the year. Then several voices fell silent within Pilot2ATC. I went through the various language settings for it and for Windows and could see that there were issues in the base OS - nothing to do with Pilot2ATC. Specifically, under Settings, Time & language, Speech, only some of the seemingly installed voices will preview.

In that same screen, there is a section headed 'Installed voice packages'. I have 4 showing, all showing a size of 0 MB. The option to remove any are greyed out.

Meanwhile back on the Time & language, Language & region screen, I could remove the extra language packs. So I did (all but English (United Kingdom)), rebooted and re-added the packs. No change.

As I tried to troubleshoot this further, I found another settings area called 'Speech Properties'. I think this comes from the old Control Panel and, again conjecture, this only deals with SAPI voices. Here too several voices would not preview. But I found a PowerShell command (Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers -Name *TextToSpeech* | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"), ran it, rebooted and then those voices started working again.

So I think that my problem now is just with Natural Voices, and perhaps Language Packs. Since this is a new PC with a new Windows licence, I opened a support case via chat. It started well but the guy helping ran out of things to try (we did sfc /scannow and DISM checks - all good) and escalated me to a 'senior technician'. That didn't go so well - seemed to be an AI bot whose main suggestion was to re-install Windows.

I persisted for a bit and got the following:

Bot WC said: You’re running into a known Windows 11 bug where voice packs appear under: Settings → Time & language → Speech → Installed voice packages …show 0 MB, and the Remove buttons are greyed out. This happens when Windows’ speech capability registration breaks, usually after updates, registry cleaners, or partial language‑pack installs. Microsoft moderators and several technical threads confirm this is an OS‑side issue, not user error.

Click to expand...

If this is correct, it suggests that a Windows Update has damaged my language installations in some way since I have no 'system cleaners' or similar utilities.

My question here is whether there are workarounds that I can try to get things working again (pending a possible fix by Microsoft). Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Thank you

see if this is any help

Thank you for the suggestion. I did find a newer version of the Visual C++ v14 Redistributable was available. So I installed that and rebooted. No change.